(Il)legalità? - Pedagogika

Pedagogika.it/2011/XV_1/(Il)legalità?/
(Il)legality?
A recent document, proposed by Telmo Pievani and Alberto Martinelli, debates,
offering a revision, the Seville Statement on violence of 1989, when a team
of scientists and scholars ventured on demonstrating that war is not an innate
need, an innate necessity in human nature. The document goes beyond this optimistic
vision maintaining that: “…It’s time to stop looking for a biological or genetic
explanation of war and thinking that man is naturally good…war and peace
are both in the abilities of man…”.
These reflections are going to be submitted to scholars who will attend the
world conference on peace and they are going to be the object of a proposal in Italian
schools whose basic concept is that “the same species that have invented war
are able to invent peace.”
We believe the same approach, which regard war/peace, love/hate antinomies as
cultural and social inventions, could be easily extended to concept of legality and
illegality too: they are cultural attitudes bound to historical events and geographical
distribution, they do not respond to nothing predetermined and, therefore,
they could be subjected to corrective actions, political actions and intentions, ethical
valuations, pedagogical interpretations and choices.
Dealing with these topics we wonder where laws draw their force; how concept
of legality originates and grows stronger; what are the conditions that promote
the consolidation of widespread behaviors of illegality, deviance and more or less
organized crime; what place takes the weakening of father figure authoritativeness
in rarefying of public ethics. And, moreover, whether there are structured or unstructured
codes conceived to transfer behaviors of indifference or impermeability
to the concepts of law, lawfulness, and legality; whether it is possible to pursue
consistent cultural and pedagogical strategies to contrast that sort of ethic relativism,
perceived by many as the fertile source of a wider process of social life decay
and barbarization that, especially in the last years, is assailing public dimension.
Dossier 9